electronic projects, tutorials, hardware hacking…

One of the best ways to learn electronics is to see how someone else, more experienced designed something. Whether you’ll disassemble some device or will see some schematic or design – it gives you invaluable experience. In many cases you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just use already known design cliche and only if needed add your own pieces of design. The more design cliche (building blocks) you know – the less time you’ll spend to make some project and the better design you’ll create.

Many people using Arduino or some other development board in their projects, instead of making their own board with microcontroller because they simply don’t know how to design PCB with microcontrollers. What microcontrollers need in order to operate?

This time I will be focusing on two most popular 8 bit micro architectures: Atmel AVR and Microchip PIC.

In reality what many people are afraid of is really simple to do. You just need a couple of passive components and you’re good to go.

My parents growing their own organic food and they asked me to deal with winter temperatures problem in the storage room. It gets really cold here, in Ukraine. Some winters have even lower temperatures than -30°C (-22°F). So right now I designing a simple thermostat for keeping temperature at about 5-7 degrees C above zero. Plus right now I started to use my garage as a gym, so this thermostat would be handy there too.

One of the most often things you need to do in electronics is to measure temperature. Even a simplest device might need an over-temperature protection.

In this temperature sensors overview video you’ll find out about most common types of temperature sensors, their main characteristics and usual ways of connecting those sensors to microcontroller. I’ll make dedicated tutorial on using each of those sensors in future, but now it’s just a review of main types.

In this video I’ll tell you what is darlington transistors, how to use them to switch medium current loads with microcontroller and what downsides they have.
Also you’ll find out about darlington arrays. Of course there would be small demonstration of controlling different loads at the end of this video.

In this followup video I’ll show some problems that I encountered with my power supply from the previous tutorial video and will show you how I fixed those.
It shows that even with the simplest project where “nothing can go wrong” you can’t predict every problem that could happen.

How to build your own linear adjustable power supply based on LM317.
In this tutorial I’ll explain how linear power supply works, what parts it consists of and a lot of small details, like how to calculate smoothing capacitor value, or how to choose a transformer. Plus you’ll see how to build an actual power supply.
You’ll find schematics, datasheets and photos at the end of this page.

I’ve got a new tool on my workbench – portable fume extractor. It’s 92mm fan that works from 4 AA batteries and has a variable speed. Mobility is a really good thing, especially when you’ve got a tons of equipment and cables on a bench you can drown in.